There has always been a tight relationship between women and advertising. Women have been the protagonists of advertising for a long time already. Traditionally seen as just responsible of the purchases for the family, they have been...
moreThere has always been a tight relationship between women and advertising. Women have been the protagonists of advertising for a long time already. Traditionally seen as just responsible of the purchases for the family, they have been increasingly used, through decades now, as an aesthetic object expected to promote all kind of products. In the beginning they were the housewives, "angels-of-the-hearth", reassuring images. Nowadays, a depiction of women in fragments prevails in advertising, in which often their heads and, by translation, their minds are secondary. The parts of their body that are portrayed – lips, legs, hands, buttocks and breasts – seduce the audience, associated with the most various and unrelated products. That gender representation in advertising is not neutral, and that this has a deep impact on society, is proved by the attention that high-ranking researchers have devoted to the ethical questions directly emerging from these matters. Erving Goffman in 1976 expressed his opinion about the contribution that the role models proposed by the media and by advertising gave to the meaning of "gender identity", since they strongly pervaded society, due to their public diffusion. We can easily state that there has been always a wall between men and women, in many contexts of society, even in commercials. But how would be possible to set the limits and the criteria that the advertising language must follow? For any legal system, an especially difficult problem consists in putting limits to the freedom of speech and, at the same time, guaranteeing the protection of a symmetric right, i.e. the respect for the integrity of a person's image. Another question of crucial importance, in a socio-legal perspective, is how rules change through time and the interplay between social and legal change. This theme implies other questions: who are the main actors of change, which are their aims, both explicit and implicit, how these aims are taken into account by either statutory law or judicial precedents, and, finally, which was the impact of legal change upon the goals pursued and upon the actors who urged this change. In the advertising industry, it is possible to find an example of the "third way" proposed by Richard Abel in his Speech and Respect, in order to solve the conflicts caused by a speech, i.e. a (semi)-informal process, as a bridge between two opposite sides, through which it is possible to regulate the speech itself, besides solving a conflict. This way, that ideal of "squaring the circle", that may seems to be unreachable while attempting to set limits – especially legal – in all those forms of expression that appear to be "continuous lines with a curvilinear and undulating trend", might become closer, at least in the field of commercial communication.
